Dillard Mill State Historic Site

The red mill on Huzzah Creek is the second on the site. The first, Wisdom's Mill, went up in the 1850s, and a rock wall along the creek was blasted open to bring it more water, which moved the creek's channel. Joseph Dillard Cottrell and his brother James owned it from 1881 to 1889, and when a post office opened in 1887 the village was named Dillard after Joseph. Under the next owner, Andrew Jackson Mincher, it burned in 1895.

Emil Mischke, an emigrant from what is now Poland, bought the property in 1900 and started the present mill four years later, reusing hand-hewn timbers from Wisdom's Mill. On plans from the Cornelius Mill Furnishing Company of St. Louis he put in steel roller mills instead of the usual buhr stones and a turbine for power, and finished in 1908. His sister Mary was his partner from 1907 to 1917. At 66 he sent for a mail-order bride, who never took to the Ozarks and talked him into selling and moving to California.

Lester Klemme bought the mill in 1930 and opened Klemme's Old Mill Lodge beside it, where $7 a day bought a cabin, the millpond and meals at the Klemme table. The mill shut in 1956 as farming gave way to mining. The L-A-D Foundation bought the property in 1974 and leased it to the state the next year. Two of the three roller mills went for scrap in World War II; the site found two similar ones in 2005, and tours now set all three running.